Linked List: July 26, 2013

Friday, 26 July 2013

My thanks to Everpix for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Everpix is a smart platform for storing your entire digital photo library, and making it available everywhere. It does all the organization work for you, based on dates and on very clever semantic analysis of the content of your photos. It’s impressive technology. They have terrific iPad and iPhone apps for viewing and browsing your library, and Mac and and Windows apps for syncing your photos from your computer to their cloud. You can keep using apps like iPhoto, Lightroom, and Aperture for importing from your camera and making editing adjustments.

Everpix first sponsored DF a few months ago, and I’ve been using it ever since. I remain as impressed today as I was back in February. Everpix is what iCloud Photo Stream dreams of being. And it just keeps getting better — just a few days ago they launched a partnership with Mosaic Photo Books. You select 20 photos from your entire Everpix collection, tap Share, and boom, you’re in Mosaic to create your beautiful book.

Sounds like a big commitment to sign up for a service that wants to sync thousands and thousands of your photos, but Everpix makes it easy, and trust me, it’s worth it. Such a great product.

The Verge: Google Nexus 7 Review ★

David Pierce:

Can Google keep the new Nexus 7 from the same fate? At the moment, it’s very fast. Powered by a hefty 1.5GHz Snapdragon S4 Pro processor and 2GB of RAM, it flits around the OS with ease, and I rarely encountered stutters, jitters, or problems of any kind. (Except scrolling. Cool job Google.)

“Except scrolling”. Scored a 9.0/10, same as the (admittedly nine-months-old) iPad Mini. Last year’s Nexus 7 got an 8.8 from The Verge, yet most people, including The Verge, now agree it was a turd.

Emojitracker: Real-Time Emoji Use on Twitter ★

Come on, you guys, let’s get PILE OF POO into the top 25, where it belongs.

Apple Developer Center Mostly Back Up ★

Finally.

Vesting Time ★

Matthew Panzarino:

The founder of Dutch software firm Sofa and its former art director have left Facebook after two years. Founder Koen Bok and art director Jorn van Dijk have both announced that today is their last day at the firm and that they will be leaving to do new things.

Sofa was acquired by Facebook almost spot on two years ago (about the time it takes shares to vest) at which time the team sold off its two big software products Kaleidoscope and versions to software firm Black Pixel.

Will be interesting to see how many other designer acqui-hires bail on Facebook when their two years are up.

Xconomy: Apple Has Boston-Area Team Working on Speech Technology ★

Curt Woodward, reporting for Xconomy:

It’s been one of the Boston-area tech industry’s more intriguing questions for months: Just what is Apple doing here?

Today, we’ve got an answer.

Apple has assembled a small team of notable names in speech technology and is looking to expand those efforts in the Boston area, industry sources tell Xconomy.

(Via Ben Thompson, who quips, “So instead of acquiring Nuance, who has other customers and drives a hard bargain, Apple is just hollowing them out.”)

Apple’s Biggest Acquisition ★

Horace Dediu has an interesting take on Apple’s stock buy-back.

Understanding Google ★

Good piece by Ben Thompson on the state of Google and how this week’s new products fit with its corporate focus. Enjoyed this footnote:

To be clear, the decision has already been made; any pundit that suggests this year’s iPad mini will be in any way influenced by the Nexus 7 is an idiot.

The App Store’s Crummy Search Results ★

Allen Pike, on the bizarrely low placement for Tweetbot and Twitterrific when searching the App Store for “twitter”:

This might make some sort of sense for somebody new to the App Store, but for a person who’s trying to find a specific type of app it’s crazy-making. Suggesting Instagram when I search for Twitter is like suggesting Nickelback when I search for Said the Whale. It’s saying, “Not sure what that means, but statistically people like this thing.”

More curation, please.

Netflix Responds to Crop Controversy ★

Sounds like they’re on the case — the cropped movies are bad transfers from the studios, not Netflix’s doing.

Update: Flavorwire reports the studios are blaming Netflix.

Jason Brennan Interviews Calca Developer Frank Krueger ★

Frank Krueger:

So I’ve always had these text file “derivations”. But it’s a terrible system: Sometimes I actually needed to do some arithmetic that I couldn’t do in my head. So I would switch to Mac’s Calculator app, or query Wolfram Alpha or use Soulver, and then switch back to my text file and plug the results in. Also, because Copy & Paste were my main tools for doing algebra, I was always suspicious of my own work.

So Calca, you could say, came about all at once as the realization that I should just write a smarter text editor to handle these files I was creating - one that knew arithmetic and algebra, had features from the programming IDEs I use every day, but still tried its best to stay out of your way (programming IDEs are often too rigid to explore ideas.)

Great interview.

Calca: Humane Symbolic Calculator for OS X and iOS ★

Amazingly clever new app by Frank Krueger. “Calculator” just doesn’t do the concept justice — think Soulver crossed with Markdown crossed with an interactive shell. No explanation will do it justice, you need to look at the examples to get it. The iOS and Mac versions can even share documents via iCloud.

More here, in Krueger’s introductory blog post.

Fast Time and the Aging Mind ★

Richard A. Friedman, writing for the NYT:

On the whole, most of us perceive short intervals of time similarly, regardless of age. Why, then, do older people look back at long stretches of their lives and feel it’s a race to the finish?

Here’s a possible answer: think about what it’s like when you learn something for the first time — for example how, when you are young, you learn to ride a bike or navigate your way home from school. It takes time to learn new tasks and to encode them in your memory. And when you are learning about the world for the first time, you are forming a fairly steady stream of new memories of events, places and people. […]

It’s simple: if you want time to slow down, become a student again. Learn something that requires sustained effort; do something novel.